Hi there, we are mostly targeting analytic use-cases with this. SQL already has a lot of analytics functionality built into the language, so we thought it might be interesting to enable it.

* We find that in the context of analytics, transactions aren't as important (they are still relevant, but people are OK if results are a bit off).

* For the MongoDB sharding model, CitusDB already keeps similar metadata and moves around shards accordingly. By syncing MongoDB's config server metadata to the CitusDB master, we can ensure that shards are moved around properly. We can also run queries across shards using this metadata.

And thanks a bunch for the encouragement. As you noted, we think of this as addressing some interesting use-cases, and are looking to get the community's feedback.